OT: Enhanced IMAP protocol

[Dale Ghent]

On Jan 6, 2010, at 10:05 AM, ram wrote:

> Everyone need not implement it. 
> If  the protocol is available , I definitely know thunderbird will have at least one extension within 2 days :-) 

That's great for Thunderbird, but how about all of the MUAs out there.

Password changes via email system has already been tried in the past in the form of Qualcomm's poppassd daemon which came with their qpopper POP3 daemon. Even this, which existed as far back as the mid-90's if not earlier, wasn't widely adopted in email clients even tough it was a simple protocol to speak. The only thing poppassd grok'd was UNIX /etc/passwd and in environments which utilized NIS, Kerberos, or later, LDAP, this service was useless.

As Rob put it, user credential management is really outside the scope of a email storage and retrieval system. Leave this aspect up to software designed to do that very thing which, by and large, would also do it better. Cyrus-IMAP and other mail systems should be focusing on enhancements which are relevant to mail and, as far as protocol extensions go, be useful to as many clients as possible.

/dale